The Devil's Dream: A Nightmare (20 page)

“What are you talking about and where’s my cocaine?”

Charles reached into his pocket, taking him a few seconds because of how tightly strained his pants were against his large legs, and then tossed him the bag. “That’s the last one you’re getting, so you need to take it slow if you want it to last. When that’s done, you’re done.”

Joe was pulling the table closer to his love seat so that he could break out a line. “What?” He said, pausing.

“You’re not going to find Brand, especially this way, with a cocaine addiction. You’re going in sober or we can go ahead and end this right here. And by end it here, I don’t mean we go our separate ways, I mean I pull the trigger but with one in the chamber this time.”

Joe kept his eyes on Charles for a few seconds, then dropped them and finished pulling the table to him.

“I put some of my stuff in there to give it more of a kick. It’s better than your bag, so at least you’ll go out with a pretty decent high.”

“You’re not making much sense. In fact, the only thing I’m really understanding is that you’ll kill me if I do anything you don’t like. I’m getting that pretty clear.”

“Take your line and listen.”

* * *

J
oe lay in a hard bed
, feeling like he might just want to get onto the floor and disperse with the notion that he had a mattress at all.

His mind was in a very, very different state.

He normally flew through two different mentalities when on cocaine. The first, almost manic thought, euphoria, and the second, like watching sap drip down a tree, moving so slow as to almost not move at all. Right now, he was—somehow—in both mindsets at once. Charles hadn’t lied about the cocaine, it was the best that Joe ever tried and now he could barely move because of it. He wondered if he was going to die, perhaps start with a nosebleed followed by his heart stopping while he lay in this strange bed. Charles talked like he knew what was going on, but that could just be a lot of talk. Maybe the dose Joe ingested was too much, even for an experienced user.

It’s not heroin.

True, but he’d never felt like this in his life. His brain was so amped, so hyped up that it had almost frozen—like an engine revved too hard. He couldn’t move from the bed, couldn’t roll over, couldn’t do anything but lie there and think.

Not like there was a shortage of things to think about, though. This Charles guy, Charles Manning—

Joe didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He still believed Charles would kill him if he thought Joe might do something stupid; and stupid for Charles seemed to mean involving cops or jeopardizing this operation. Joe planned on doing neither of those, so he thought his life was safe in that regard, but could he believe the rest? That this man, this fat, mid-thirties drug dealer was out here looking for Brand? Had somehow stumbled over the same thing as Joe? Ended up in the sex-slave industry because Brand was here?

He didn’t stumble. You stumbled. He saw it from miles off and moved in with the stealth of a snake.

Maybe.

Or maybe the man had simply done a lot of research on Joe before he invited him in and he had ulterior motives. There wasn’t any way Joe could tell.

It’s too late for all that thinking. That thinking should have been done a long time ago, maybe in the hotel room or maybe before that, even. Now you can’t get out of this bed to get a glass of water, so leave the heavy thinking to someone that can.

If Joe listened to himself, and the heavy thinking meant questioning the veracity of Charles’ claim, then that left him without much to do except trust.

And how hard was it to believe Charles’ story? Any harder than to believe Joe’s own?

* * *

“
H
ow many people
know the name Jared Manning? I bet one percent of the people that read Dillan’s second book even remember my brother was a cop, killed while doing his duty,” Charles had said.

It seemed, to Joe, that Charles had really internalized that piece: his brother mattered. Joe hadn’t needed to internalize that for his wife and child—they were his life—but for Charles, he wanted the world to know that his brother was a person with hopes, aspirations, demons. His brother wasn’t a prop.

Charles wasn’t a fan of Jeffrey Dillan. Much of the world wasn’t either, once the truth came out, although they went ahead and gobbled up the man’s book like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. Charles didn’t like him because he was a shitty person, and that said something coming from a drug dealer, but Charles also didn’t like him because Dillan’s book
only
focused on Brand. Everything, in both books, took the viewpoint that Matthew Brand was the only person in the universe who mattered, and the rest of the people on Earth were props to be moved around. Props. That’s what his brother, Jared, ended up being to the world, just a prop. Someone that Matthew killed in order to get to the next prop, and that bothered Charles a lot. It made him sick to his stomach when he really started to think about it, which he rarely did anymore. He avoided the subject much like Joe, sans the cocaine. But, still, his brother was a not a fucking prop. That was the point: what the world forgot when they condemned Jeffrey Dillan for basically aiding a serial killer. They forgot it when they read his book. They forgot that the people Brand came into contact with had lives, had families, had an importance outside of their brief interactions with that raving lunatic.

Although, vengeance was an important part of this as well, it seemed to run neck and neck with letting people, or maybe just Charles, know that his brother still mattered. That his life mattered on its own merits.

“We didn’t talk much. I don’t guess that’s a surprise, given my occupation and his.”

The whole thing was a surprise. The fact that Charles Manning existed and was walking around in this house swinging a gun and talking about murder was a surprise. The drug dealer/cop brother relationship only added to it.

They didn’t talk much, according to Charles, but not because Jared judged him too harshly.

“He knew what I did and he didn’t like it. He wasn’t one of those law code thumping cops, the kind that would throw you in a gas chamber if the law said it needed to happen. He didn’t like what I did because he saw the end effects of it. Kids without parents. Break-ins. Death. The stuff we’ve been taught drugs lead to since we were old enough to read the DARE signs in school. I don’t blame him for that belief, it went with his line of work, and really, I don’t blame him for not talking to me anymore. You get over a lot of past grievances pretty quick once someone has died, but I’m sure you understand that as well as anyone, huh?”

They grew apart because Charles wanted to sell drugs while Jared wanted to serve and protect. Jared married and Charles didn’t. Jared had a kid and Charles didn’t. The kid was six years old now living with his mother. Charles stopped by when he could, which sounded, to Joe, like a few times each year.

“How long before he died did you talk to him last?”

“I don’t know. A year maybe. Saw him at mom’s on Christmas, but we didn’t say much.”

Charles didn’t talk about that, about the fact that he didn’t exist in his brother’s life, and Joe imagined it was for similar reasons as to why he didn’t talk about his son’s life. What could he really even say about the first year of his son’s life? He smiled? He slept? He made messes? And the fact that Joe barely knew his own kid because the child never had the chance to develop created a sadness that he would probably never be able to deal with.

“I looked for Brand after I heard about him breaking out of The Wall that second time. I mean, I didn’t look, but I put feelers out. I kept people aware in my circle, kept them looking for a black dude, which brought up a lot of false positives in my line of work.” Charles laughed at that. Joe didn’t. “It wasn’t until this past year that I heard something though. Nothing solid, just birds whistling in trees. I hadn’t focused on Brand in a long time, man. I had my business to run and people under me, people close to me, had caught some cases—so I was trying to separate myself from them. Shit was busy, you could say.”

The whistling in the trees got his attention though, brought him away from his drug business and even away from the court cases.

He had come east to find Brand.

Charles received a picture from one of his feelers. He wasn’t some street dope dealer who people hit up on their phones when they needed a dime bag. He was middle management, connected to the big men and two steps removed from the street hustlers. His feelers could reach a long way, he said, stretching the boundaries of the Midwest. Somehow a picture of a strange looking black dude found its way to Charles’ hands. A black guy with blue eyes. A black dude whose past mug shot said he used to have brown eyes. A black dude that had about a million newspaper articles written on him twenty years ago as the first inmate in The Wall. A black dude whose name was Arthur Morgant.

“He was looking for sex slaves. Weirdest shit I’ve ever seen, man. Here is this guy, wanted by every law enforcement agency in the United States, and he’s going through the channels to find himself sex slaves. I didn’t understand it at all. And, apparently, he had the people selling fooled, as in they thought he was some guy named Jamal Something-or-Other. I read up on the Morgant character, saw he was a serial rapist, and thought maybe it wasn’t Brand at all. Except I kept going back to those blue eyes in that one picture. Then I read about a million times what that doctor in charge of The Wall said. Basically, it was highly probable that Matthew Brand had implanted his own brain over Morgant’s. So, I thought, fuck it.”

Morgant was going to die; whether Morgant turned out to be a rapist or a cop killer, the man was going to die.

Charles used everything, every bit of muscle, of political capital, of connections he had, to work his way into the sex trade. He made the transition and now he was simply a delivery man. He’d left middle-management for a job on the road and he didn’t regret it at all. Because it was going to, at some point, put him in contact with Matthew Brand.

“I mean, once that letter came out, it all made sense. He’s using these Asians for the bodies that he’s going to blow up the Earth with, or whatever he plans on doing. I don’t really care about all that. I just want to be able to make one delivery to him, face to face, and that will be the end of him. He isn’t going to get the chance to blow anyone up.”

When Charles heard about some guy wanting to know more from Sally, who despite what she told Joe, sold women off left and right (which was how she knew Charles), he got Joe Welch’s name. From there, he looked up just about everything he could find on the man in the hotel room who was all of a sudden interested in sex slaves.

“And then, well, I thought it would be a good idea for us to meet. If it didn’t work out, you wouldn’t be the first guy I’ve had to kill because things didn’t work out.”

* * *

T
here was
a plan to all this. One that would go into effect fairly shortly, although Charles didn’t list out a timeline.